advantages and limitations of different media: speech, text, image-intro to digital media

1. Advantages and
Limitations of Traditional
Media
Notes from:
Teaching Every Student in the Digital Age:
Universal Design for Learning

2. “Learners’ capacities are
not inherent; capacities
are defined by the
interplay between
learners’ abilities and the
tools they use.”

3. The tools we use…

4. Traditional Fixed Media
• Speech
• Text
• Images

5. Speech
Advantages
• Natural sounding
• Expressive
• Vary: pace, volume, pitch to
emphasize points
• Physical cues: facial
expression, gestures,
posture
• Respond to audience
Limitations
• Listener’s must
remember
• Easy to overload on
info
• Can’t pause it live

6. Text
Advantages
• Reduces memory
demands
• Revisit any time
• Distributed to mass
audience
Limitations
• Lacks
expressiveness
• Must understand
different formats:
novel, newspaper,
poems, reference
• Conventions can be
tough to understand

7. Images
Advantages
• Communicate
everything at once
• Easily present
emotion, feeling,
mood, relationships,
comparisons
• No decoding
Limitations
• Not ideal for:
philosophical,
abstract
• Cannot
communicate
anything below the
surface

8. No media is perfect for
every student so we should
always have several media
options.

9. Flexible Digital Media
“Digital media becomes flexible in the way
the content is stored and transmitted.”
“What was once permanent can be
altered, removed at will, or restored-
multiple times.”

10. Flexible Digital Media
Digital Media is
• Versatile
• Transformable
• Can be marked
• Can be networked